A portfolio of my past writing, and new stories as I develop them. Almost always deliberately funny.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Prologue: ‘I think I’ll just come in’

I have been ignoring the best writing advice I ever got.

In the foreword to radio comedian Fred Allen’s autobiography,
“Much Ado about Me,” Fred relates advice John Steinbeck gave him.

“. . . try to remember it so clearly that you can see
things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to
remember people. And then just tell what happened. . . . Put it all in. Don’t
try to organize it. . . . Don’t think back over what you have done. Don’t think
of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. . . . cutting comes later. The
form will develop in the telling.”

The one time I followed these dicta I produced my most odd
and most widely-read independently published story to date (it didn’t hurt that
it centered on midget wrestling). It took over a year to write, and it probably
shows. It was the most challenging and the most rewarding project I have
undertaken to date.

And I couldn’t get anyone to buy it.

I’ve been writing for 40 years, professionally for 30. Along
the way I’ve written standup, sketch comedy, plays, for radio and TV, newspapers,
magazines, and websites. I’ve interviewed famous people, covered crime, tracked
political upheavals, and written about just about every art form on the planet.
I have a leg up on all the templates, in style as well as form -- the
advertisement disguised as breaking news, the heart-tugging feature, the
seemingly balanced analysis, and the crooked results imposed by all the teapot
tempests and pet peeves of moneyed clients, publishers, owners, editors, and
controlling interests.

At any given moment I am writing or selling something. This
incessant practice has led to a craftsmanship of which I am justly proud. But what
good is it to crank out technically perfect and quite readable stories about
shit? In comedy, it’s called being a hack. This slew of imitative, safe,
predictable content producers persist everywhere, shovel the publishers’
furnaces full of words that curl, crisp, burn and are ash-expelled in the blink
of an eye. The avalanche of data continues, whether I pitch in or not.

In this post-journalism world, acting as a communicator for
private interests is no better. Hey, believe me, I tried to sell out! Over and
over again, I attempted to gain acceptance, to find a group to be a part of, to
sand down my prickly talents to fit the required measurements. Few takers. My
level of talent, my faint-heartedness, my sheer self-destructive cussedness,
luck, destiny has seen to that. So what do I want? Not to engage in precocious
journaling, or addled gonzo narratives. What is the way out of the impasse?

Truth, first. Why is speaking the truth such an imperative?
I grew up surrounded by lies and evasion, I developed a desire for truth. To
root the truth out of myself, a practiced dissembler. Not facts. Truth. I’ve
seen too many pages of bland facts obscure the truth. Alan Moore, in his “Promethea,”
states that humans are amphibians of the psyche, half in the world of reality
and half in the world of imagination. I would like to hear the clear clang of these
hemispheres colliding in my head, for once, instead of being worried about it
or muffling it with fears.

So, an approach that blends the reality and the imagination,
the personal and the general. Open, relaxed, and conversational, admitting bias
and uncertainty. Playing up and down the spectrum of the dynamic paradox.

What if I write with the intent of seeing what happens? Am I
capable of being honest? Above all, will it be interesting? Enjoyable? Helpful?
Readable? A kind of Fourth Step for public consumption? At this point, it does
not matter. I am still turning out the standard fare for fun and profit. But it’s
not enough.

Look for installments in my “Pursuit of Happiness” series in
the months to come, centering on such unoffending topics such as sex, drugs,
God, money, power, society, family. Maybe it’ll be fascinating, maybe it’ll be
crap. Maybe it’ll be both. We’ll see, won’t we?

The source of the title quote comes from an anecdote I
recall reading about actor Ralph Richardson, which of course I can’t find the
source of now. Still, it sticks in my mind so strongly that, if it is not true,
it oughta be. Evidently Richardson was a stickler for establishing his
character with his first entrance. Well, in a show in later life, he
could not get his entrance down. He drove the director and his fellow actors
mad for weeks, trying every conceivable way to get on stage in character.

Finally, the night before opening, Richardson went to the
director and told him he had solved the problem. “I think I’ll just come in,”
he said.

I think I’ll just come in.

"In dark times, the definition of good art would seem
to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and
magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good
fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both
to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and
human in it." – David Foster Wallace

About Me

This award-winning independent writer and editor returned to the place where he grew up after years as a wandering comedian. It's beautiful here. He served in a variety of capacities for the Boulder International Film Festival from 2006 through 2014. His writing portfolio includes stories written on topics ranging from grand opera to midget wrestling, for a diverse array of magazines, newspapers and websites worldwide -- including Film International, Westword, Boulder Magazine, Power Pickin', Parterre, Understanding Our Gifted, Movie Habit, Backstage, Muso, 5280, EnCompass, Senses of Cinema, Boulder Jewish News and . . . Philly Sports Faithful, for some reason. Also poet, playwright, screenwriter, blah blah blah. Check out his work at brad-weismann.com, filmpatrol.com and obitpatrol.com.

PM Dawn; Of the Heart Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

Ramones, Ramonesmania

Richard and Linda Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver

Richard Pryor, Wanted

Richard Thompson, Henry the Human Fly

Robert Klein, New Teeth

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma/Carousel/The King and I

Roger Miller, The Return of Roger Miller

Rolling Stones, Some Girls

Shostakovich, Symphony #4 - Inbal, Wiener Symphoniker

Sibelius, Symphony 5 (final version) -- Vanska, Lahti Symphony

Sly and the Family Stone, Anthology

Steeley Dan, Pretzel Logic

Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life

Stravinsky, Les Noces -- Bernstein

Strength in Numbers, The Telluride Sessions

Talking Heads, Fear of Music

The Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio

The Kinks, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One

The Mothers, Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets

The Mothers, We're Only in It for the Money

The Velvet Underground & Niko

Tom Tom Club, Tom Tom Club

Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner

Uncle Earl, Waterloo Tennessee

Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision

Village Music of Bulgaria/Bulgarian Folk Music

Vivaldi, The Four Seasons -- Zuckerman

Was (Not Was), Born to Laugh at Tornadoes

Ween, Chocolate and Cheese

Willie Dixon, The Chess Box

Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie

XTC, English Settlement

" . . . you've got to stand up for the imaginative world, the imaginative element in the human personality, because I think that's constantly threatened . . . People do have imagination and sensibilities, and I think that does need constant exposition." -- John Read

"To disseminate my subjective thoughts and ideas, I stealthily hide them in a cloak of entertaining storytelling, since the depth of my thinking, shallow at best, might be challenged by erudite experts." -- Curt Siodmak